At least 40 people were killed and more than 150 were injured when a bridge collapsed during a Jewish religious ceremony in the occupied territories on Friday morning.
The incident reportedly took place near Mount Jarmaq, northwest of the city of Hebron.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the incident as a “deadly catastrophe.”
This is the first large Zionist rally since the beginning of the Corona epidemic, and the Zionist army has sent rescue teams to the scene.
“People came to celebrate Lag BaOmer and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and unfortunately were literally crushed to death,” said Dov Maisel, of United Hatzalah, an Israeli volunteer emergency medical services organization that was on the scene.
Stills from drone video taken of the event Thursday showed what appeared to be thousands of people gathering for the festivities.
Magen David Adom, Israel’s national medical emergency services, said it received a call about a stampede at Mount Meron at 12:50 a.m. Friday (5:50 p.m. Thursday ET). Health officials put the number of those confirmed dead at 40.
One video posted on social media overnight appeared to show a mass of people spilling down an open-air corridor, amid what appeared to be a cacophony of alarming sounds as people were carried along with the crowd.
In a separate video, people appear to be being pulled back and forward by the momentum of a crowd.
Avi Maruc, head of United Hatzalah’s medical department, told NBC News how in the early hours of Friday he had performed CPR on around two dozen people, including a teenager, who he had found collapsed on the stairs.
“There were a lot of people just lying on top of the other, not breathing,” he said. “People were suffocated because they fell on top of each other.”
Maruc said that, having worked more than 18 years a paramedic, it was surreal to see people not bleeding, but suffocated.
“It’s a scene that doesn’t make sense,” he said.
A 24-year-old witness, identified only by his first name, Dvir, told the Army Radio station that “masses of people were pushed into the same corner and a vortex was created,” according to The Associated Press.
